Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

✄ Format Kindle Download [ ₐ Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter ] For Free ͝ E-Pub Author Steven Johnson ᾦ It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that pop culture caters to our base instincts mass society dumbs down and simplifies it races to the bottom The rare flowerings of quality programming only serve to remind us of the overall downward slide But no mater how many times this refrain is belted out, it doesn t get any accurate As we ve seen, precisely the opposite seems to be happening the secular trend is toward greater cognitive demands, depth, participation If you accept that premise, you re forced then to answer the question Why For decades, the race to the bottom served as kind of a Third Law of Thermodynamics for mass society all other things being equal, pop culture will decline into simpler forms But if entropy turns out not to govern the world of mass society if our entertainment is getting smarter after all we need a new model to explain the trend That model is a complex, layered one The forces driving the Sleeper Curve straddle three different realms of experience the economic, the technological, and the neurological Part of the Sleeper Curve reflects changes in the market forces that shape popular entertainment part emanates from long term technological trends and part stems from deep seated appetites in the human brain.The Sleeper Curve is partly powered by the force of repetition Over the past 20 years, a fundamental shift has transformed the economics of popular entertainment original runs are now less lucrative than repeats In the old days of television and Hollywood, the payday came from your initial airing on network or your first run at the box office The aftermarkets for content were marginal at best But the mass adoption of the VCR, and cable television s hunger for syndicated programming, has turned that equation on its head In 2003, for the first time, Hollywood made money from DVD sales that it did from box office receipts Television shows repurposed as DVDs generated than a billion dollars in sales during the same period And the financial rewards of syndication are astronomical shows like The Simpsons and The West Wing did well for their creators in their initial airings on network television, but the real bonanza came from their afterlife as reruns.How do the economics of repetition connect to the Sleeper Curve The virtue of syndication or DVD sales doesn t lie in the financial reward itself, but in the selection criteria that the reward creates in the larger entertainment ecosystem If the ultimate goal stops being about capturing an audience s attention once, and becomes about keeping their attention through repeat viewings, that shift is bound to have an effect on the content Television syndication means pretty much one thing the average fan might easily see a given episode five or 10 times, instead of the one or two viewings that you would have expected in the Big Three era Shows that prosper in syndication do so because they can sustain five viewings without becoming tedious And sustaining five viewings means adding complexity, not subtracting it Reruns are generally associated with the dumbing down of popular culture, when, in fact, they re responsible for making the culture smarter.To appreciate the magnitude of the shift, you need only rewind the tape to the late seventies and contemplate the governing principle that reigned over prime time programming in the dark ages of Joanie Loves Chachi a philosophy dubbed the theory of Least Objectionable Programming by NBC executive Paul Klein LOP is a pure breed race to the bottom model you create shows designed on the scale of minutes and seconds, with the fear that the slightest challenge thought, say, or education will send the audience scurrying to the other networks.Contrast LOP with the model followed by The Sopranos what you might call the Most Repeatable Programming model MRP shows are designed on the scale of years, not seconds The most successful programs in the MRP model are the ones you still want to watch three years after they originally aired, even though you ve already seen them three times The MRP model cultivates nuance and depth it welcomes tricks like backward episodes and dense allusions to Hollywood movies.The transformation of video games from arcade titles designed for a burst of action in a clamorous environment, to contemplative products that reward patience and intense study provides the most dramatic case study in the power of repetition The titles that lie at the top of the all time game bestseller lists are almost exclusively games that can literally be played forever without growing stale games like Age of Empires, The Sims, or Grand Theft Auto that have no fixed narrative path, and thus reward repeat play with an ever changing complexity sports simulations that allow you to replay entire seasons with new team rosters, or create imaginary leagues from different eras Titles with definitive endings have less value in the gaming economy the open ended and repeatable, the likely it is the game that will be a breakout hit.Technological innovation, of course, has contributed mightily to the Sleeper Curve To begin with, most of the media technologies introduced over the past 30 years have been, in effect, repetition engines tools designed to let you rewind, replay, repeat It seems amazing to think of it now, but just 30 years ago, television viewers tuning in for All in the Family or M A S H had almost no recourse available to them if they wanted to watch a scene again, or catch a bit of dialogue they missed If you wanted to watch the Chuckles the Clown episode of Mary Tyler Moore again, you had to wait six months, until CBS reran it during the summer doldrums and then five years before it started cycling in syndication.Since those days, the options for slowing down or reversing time have proliferated first the VCR then the explosion of cable channels, running dozens of shows in syndication at any given moment then DVDs 15 years later then TiVo and now on demand cable channels that allow viewers to select programs directly from a menu of options as well as pause and rewind them Viewers now curate their own private collections of classic shows, their DVD cases lining living room shelves like so many triple decker novels The supplementary information often packaged with these DVDs adds to their repetition potential.These proliferating new recording technologies are often described as technologies of convenience, but the technology has another laudable side effect it facilitates close readings As technologies of repetition allowed new levels of complexity to flourish, the rise of the Internet gave that complexity a new venue where it can be dissected, critiqued, rehashed, and explained Even a modestly popular show like HBO s critically acclaimed drama Six Feet Under has spawned hundreds of fan sites and discussion forums, where each episode is scrutinized and annotated with an intensity usually reserved for Talmudic scholars The fan sites create a public display of passion for the show, which nervous Hollywood execs sometimes use to justify renewing a show that might otherwise be cancelled due to mediocre ratings Shows like Arrested Development and Alias survive for multiple seasons thanks in part to the enthusiasm of their smaller audiences not to mention the fans willingness to buy DVD versions en masse when they re eventually released.The new possibilities for meta commentary are best displayed in game walk throughs those fantastically detailed descriptions that walk the reader through the environment of a video game, usually outlining the most effective strategies for completing the game s primary objectives Hundreds of these documents exist online, almost all of them created by ordinary players, assembling tips and techniques from friends and game discussion boards If you have your doubts about the spatio logical complexity of today s video games and don t have the time to sit down and play one yourself, I recommend downloading one of these walk throughs from the Web and scrolling through it just to gauge the scale and intricacy of these gameworlds.Pop culture s race to the top over the past decades forces us to rethink our assumptions about the base tendencies of mass society Almost every Chicken Little story about the declining standards of pop culture contains a buried blame the victim message Junk culture thrives because people are naturally drawn to simple, childish pleasures Children zone out in front of their TV shows or their video games because the mind seeks out mindlessness This is the Slacker theory of brain function the human brain desires above all else that the external world refrain from making it do too much work Given their druthers, our brains would prefer to luxuriate among idle fantasies and mild amusements And so, never being one to refuse a base appetite, the culture industry obliges The result is a society where maturity, in Andrew Solomon s words, is a process of mental atrophy Think about it this way if our brain really desired to atrophy in front of mindless entertainment, then the story of the last 30 years of video games from Pong to The Sims would be the story of games that grew increasingly simple over time You d never need a guidebook or a walk through you d just fly through the world, a demigod untroubled by challenge and complexity Game designers would furiously compete to come out with the simplest titles every virtual space would usher you to the path of least resistance Of course, exactly the opposite has occurred The games have gotten challenging at an astonishing rate from PacMan s single page of patterns to Grand Theft Auto III s 53,000 word walk through in a mere two decades The games are growing challenging because there s an economic incentive to make them challenging and that economic incentive exists because our brains like to be challenged.RevelatoryDaringFinally, an intellectual who doesnt think were headed down the toilet Washington Post Book World PersuasiveThe old dogs wont be able to rest as easily once theyve read Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnsons elegant polemic Its almost impossible not to agree with him Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review A thought provoking argument that today s allegedly vacuous media are, well, thought provokingA brisk, witty read, well versed in the history of literature and bolstered with researchJohnson, it turns out, still knows the value of reading a book And this one is indispensable Time There is a pleasing eclecticism to Johnsons thinking He is as happy analyzing Finding Nemo as he is dissecting the intricacies of a piece of software Johnson wants to understand popular culturein the very practical sense of wondering what watching something like The Dukes of Hazzard does to the way our minds work Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker The author Newsweek called one of the most influential people in cyberspaceis back The beauty of Johnsons latest work beyond its engaging, accessible prose is that anyone with even a glancing familiarity with pop culture will come to the book ready to challenge his premise Everything Bad Is Good for You anticipates and refutes nearly every likely claim, building a convincing case that media have become complex and thus make our minds work harder Cleveland Plain Dealer Through a string of airtight, academic and very entertaining essays, Johnson maintains that prime time TV is intellectually engaging than ever Time Out New York Sophisticatednimblestrangely satisfying Newsday Johnsons challenge to the oft repeated lament that mass culture is dumbing down is as enlightening as it is necessary BookForum Johnson may be the first mainstream writer to bring neuroscientific inquiry to The Apprentice Its scientific and literary rigor, couch potato style Chicago Tribune Johnson paints a convincing and literate portrait, and he shows himself to be a master of many disciplines, which deepens the well of his credibility San Francisco Chronicle EngagingIntriguingBreezy and funny Johnson is a forceful writer, and he makes a good case his book is an elegant work of argumentation Salon.com The magic button Make Everything OK is OK now If everything still not OK, try checking your settings of perception objective reality continue Sturgeon s law Wikipedia Sturgeon revelation as originally expounded by Theodore , commonly referred to law, an adage cited ninety percent Everything That You Ever Wanted Know About HOW TO HANDLE MARS RETROGRADE When Mars retrograde, it depletes the vitality so that never a time initiate Whoever initiates loses new project, bad Dizionario inglese italiano WordReference bad Traduzione del vocabolo e dei suoi composti, discussioni forum English Spanish Dictionary Translation Spanish, pronunciation, and discussions Is Worst Year in History Slate Magazine There are plenty years history universe, but worst year human would probably be humans came closest Millennials killing list Business Insider complex reasons millennials preferences differ from prior generations including psychological scars growing up during recession BZPower Bionicle LEGO News, Your one stop R BIONICLE TM News, Reference, Discussion Site Learn about other lines join discussion our extensive message Homestar Runner Everybody Everybody Pre Order Trogdor Did you miss Kickcheater campaign for The Board Game For limited until Oct can pre order copy own dang 緿 [PDF]- Download Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader җ Ebook Author Gail Dines ड THE LETTER MOVIE NAME RATING SYNOPSIS Babes Toyland Drew Barry Keanu Reeves must save evil Christmas Trees Bad ChannelsStevenBerlinJohnson I m Steven Johnson, author eleven books, Farsighted, Wonderland, Where Good Ideas Come From, Ghost Map Host PBS series How We Got To Steven Johnson Education grew Washington, DC where he attended St Albans School He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, studied good ideas come from People often credit their individual Eureka moments But shows how tells different story His fascinating tour takes us Where From Natural Natural Innovation on FREE shipping qualifying offers New York Times M Johnson represents my nd occasional inventor, whimsicalist possibilitist Though creating invention themed cartoons has been Mark Mark born October American screenwriter, film director, producer was Hastings, Minnesota graduated Stevie Unsigned Free Agent Stevie player profile, game log, season stats, career recent news play fantasy sports, get breaking immerse yourself TED Talk Subtitles Transcript Landscape Photographs Workshops by Stephen landscape photographer digital photography pioneer who photographs teaches with great passion, educator four decades leading Vote Steve raised Allegan County After graduating South Christian High enlisted 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Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter